“It wasn’t just one fishing boat, but a line of them spread out along the South American coast,” Chiao said. “That’s why it looked like five lights from the ISS.”

Chiao’s story is similar to several incidents in the ISS’s long history.

The fact is that although “unexplained” or strange sightings of lights and even objects have been reported throughout the history of the space race, none of them have held any real weight as UFO “experiences.”

When astronaut Chris Cᴀssidy saw a UFO floating by his window in 2013? It was an antenna covering. When Italian Samantha Cristoforetti reported an “alien-like” presence outside the space station, she was talking about the sun, not an actual alien. And no, pausing briefly before answering a question about a UFO is not the same thing as saying you saw one.

It turns out that all reports of aliens from ISS astronauts fall into the same problems as those seen by other space travelers. Like the time the Gemini IV pilot saw a spinning white cylinder in space? (A rocket booster.) The circular “objects” that approached the Space Shuttle in 1996? A video illusion. And no, there were no aliens outside the Apollo 11 capsule, despite some poorly worded quotes suggesting otherwise.

There’s a vague theory that any event that’s overanalyzed  enough will eventually seem inexplicable. Whether it’s a murder or a sporting event, the theory goes that if enough people sift through enough pH๏τographic and video evidence, they can use it to explain just about anything. In the case of the ISS, that’s a bit of a problem. There have always been cameras aboard the space station. And there have always been publicly available archives of images and video clips to comb through for any tiny imperfection—a blip of data, a reflected light—to blow up in PH๏τoshop and claim as evidence of a UFO.

But since 2014, NASA has been streaming—and archiving—constant, live, high-definition video of Earth. Almost immediately, UFOs started appearing (on YouTube). And since then, things have gotten a little out of hand.

Since October alone, at least four UFOs have apparently been spotted outside the ISS. Earlier this year, someone even spotted a craft “docked” with the space station. Many of these typically pixelated, slow-motion clips are the work of famed UFO detective Streetcap1, who documents a large number of UFO sightings on his Facebook page and YouTube (he has nearly 10,000 subscribers), which are then collected by UFOSightingsDaily and — from time to time — reposted by sites like ours. And now they’re popping up all the time.

In a recent clip, NASA’s feed appeared to cut out just after a gray shape (presumably the Moon) emerged on the horizon. Streetcap1 said it was definitely not the Moon, but it turned out to be the Moon. Meanwhile, we wrote a short, skeptical post about it, and it ended up being shared on Facebook 60,000 times.

So what’s going on?

First, let’s ᴀssume for a moment that these objects aren’t actually aliens. There’s, of course, a slim possibility that they are — though we’d need a little more than a bright light in the distance in a 10-second video to believe it.

In reality, this just seems like a volume issue. The amount of footage being constantly transmitted from the ISS means that something imperfect will almost always show up somewhere in a week’s worth of video – if you look closely enough, you’ll find a bright object in the background, just as you would if it were a live video stream from any other dark area.

And it’s not like there aren’t a number of possible explanations: stray asteroids, space debris, reflections, and even an oddly shaped moon have all been blamed for sightings in the past.